psycholist

Based on how badly a couple of friend's of mine's Fox forks shit themselves and how bad the warranty support was I wouldn't go near their products. Marzocchi's quality seems to have got worse since they moved production to the far east, supposedly for 'quality' reasons, but they're still pretty solid. Since SRAM bought them Rockshox have got much better to the degree where I'd now consider buying one - they used to literally last about a month before something broke). Magura forks look to be very well made and work well based on trying a friend's fork, but they're expensive...

3D models are the only way to be sure everything will work properly (Without a hell of a lot of extra effort anyway). The main thing that has to be done with whatever design you arrive at is to make sure it's compatible with existing components. If you have a trials bike handy measure things like the actual wheel diameter and width (Chainstay clearance is a big design constraint in setting up trials frames), make sure there's crank clearance around Magura pistons. Setting the brake mounts to be centered on the rim is critical too. Google have a 3D CAD package they allow free download here and it seems pretty good: http://sketchup.google.com/ I'm a fan of industrial packages such as ProEngineer (My favourite package - as used by Caterpillar, the Volkswagen Audi group, parts of Toyota, Santa Cruz Bikes, John Deere and SRAM), Solidworks (You can see this in action on Orange County Choppers), Catia, Microstation, Rhino3D, CADKey and Inventor (Made by the same company as AutoCAD but good for 3D) and am pretty sure AutoCAD is the work of the devil unless all you do are 2D drawings, in which case you're missing out on a lot of the benefits of CAD in the first place. If you get used to any parametric 3D package you can pick up others pretty quickly too - it's a pretty useful skill to have as well.

I spotted this link to the Sheffield Moto Trials round on Saturday 9/1/2010 off Bikemagic - it's a world moto trials round and Danny Mac's doing the interval show: http://www.sheffieldarena.co.uk/whats-on/t...orcycle-trials/ I plan to fly over from Ireland - how easy is it to get transport to the arena and what's accommodation like in & around Sheffield? Also, Toni Bou's doing gaps to front now ... See 4:51 http://www.photobysergio.fr/bou-santa-perpetua-video.html

Anyone remember Scott Dommet's trials section on the Dirt video ... Hopping around on rocks to impress gurls - awesome ... And he was using canti brakes - come to think of it so was I back then...

Another vote for the ENO. Tarty Adam mentioned to me in an email a while ago that the ENO uses a 1.375" thread rather than a 1.37" thread, so it increases the possibility of it pulling the threads off a crank. Mine's been going strong for 2 years though, so probably not a big issue. I had a look inside it once and that's about it regarding servicing.

I'm pretty sure all trials riders are about the same in terms of the madness that's never far from the conversation. Looks like the Cork ferry has disappeared alright. Conveniently done Laoghaire near Dublin has a great mix of natural and street lines and a ferry goes straight there from Holyhead (Which incidentally also has a few class trials bits as we discovered when our ferry home was delayed a few hours) ... I also have some days where I see and nail lines I never thought of before and others where nothing seems to quite work right and it's hard to work out what causes the change. Main thing to do is not spend time getting pissed off at not being able to do a line (Unless you're really close and adding polish of course) as a succession of failures trains the muscles to perform the failed version of the move rather than the intended one.

I know one of his Caelifera frames was bought by a friend of mine and is in Ireland now... TRA's signature is in the top tube . It's rained almost continuously since he built the bike up ...

The super 8 will feel very sloppy and old fashioned compared to a modern DH frame. A friend of mine used to have one and the most alarming thing it would do was having the main triangle of the frame pivot around the swingarm when you pulled the front up to huck off something. It could have been the shock settings, but given the pivot location, you'd need a very special shock to deal with that properly. If you're planning on using it for DH and not hucking then you may not notice this behaviour. I like my bikes to pivot around the back axle when I shift my weight backwards though - especially as the shock will prematurely slap the front wheel back into the ground when you pull back on the Super 8. If you pedal off the edge of a drop this effect is lessened though. The back end is quite long leading to difficult cornering when it gets tight too, but I notice that even comparing my Trance to my DMR hardtail. This bike is one to have for polishing and to feel you own a MTB design classic rather than a bike that's still competitive for modern use - for that purpose I'd be half tempted to get one myself...

You could try my method and be so bad at bailing that if you get it wrong it's pretty much certain you're going down with the ship. Guaranteed to increase the percentage of lines you make cleanly admittedly at the expense of the number you attempt in the first place ... If you're on your own listening to music is brilliant as it allows you to switch off all the distractions around you. If you're in a group it's a bit weird though... Given the danger of falling off something trying not to laugh at some of the conversations that go on once we get going it might be somewhat justified come to think of it ...

Just move your weight to the opposite side to the one you want to turn the bike to, to preload the spin and then turn the bike in the air. What I found was that rather than thinking about where to put my weight on take-off, I ended up focusing on landing with my weight in the right place to stay balanced after the hop. You'll probably find from just hopping on the spot that there's a bit of side to side and twisting in the bike between hops anyway, so try hopping on the spot making sure each landing is balanced and keeping an eye out for what starts to tweak the bike around.

The Rock Greens bite and hold really well on anodised surfaces, not sure about paint, but they probably work very well there too. The tiniest bit of water and they offer no bite or hold though, so not really suitable for anything other than indoor riding at the moment.

If you can already pivot on the front then the easiest way to pivot on the rear wheel is to stay spinning after a front wheel pivot. Roll forward, jam the front brake on with your weight to the side of the front tyre you want to pivot to. Pick the back wheel up, spin on the front and as the back wheel comes down, hold the back brake, let your weight shift onto the back wheel and keep your body turning in the same direction as you spun on the front. You can make the pivot further by pulling the handlebars up after the back wheel has touched down. The pull on the handlebars is the same for a static rear wheel pivot. How to get it past 180 degrees on either wheel I have no idea though (I know that theoretically you need to get the spin axis of your centre of gravity to pass through the contact patch of the tyre on the ground, but how to achieve this I have no idea)...

That's what I use. If you're running tyre pressure low enough to pull the tyre off then a steel bead will pull off pretty much as easily. Raising the tyre pressure or using a wider rim or a tyre with a heavier wall will all contribute to keeping the tyre seated on side loads.

Thinking through the possibilities if stuff goes wrong is part of the reason I'm shite at trials. The risk/reward starts to look very unfavourable once a big fall is involved, even though I've taken some really nasty falls (Like straight onto my face into concrete backwheeling off a 2 foot wall) and walked away with very minor injuries I still don't like being in a situation where that can happen, so I stick with stuff that's difficult but not dangerous. Trials is all about muscle memory though. There isn't time to consciously sort everything out as you go over an obstacle. Once you know you can confidently do each component of a line, then stringing it together I'm thinking only in general terms about what I should be doing - stuff like 'front tyre must be here', 'switch to back at this point', 'keep weight forward' etc., so I assume I can automatically sort out all the balance and weight shifts needed to get to each point. Sometimes I even get it right ...

Sounds interesting alright. A frame the chain can be removed on without a chain tool is pretty irrelevant as the process of getting the chain to the right length will lead to the potential for an unreliable join in the chain. If the frame is set up so the chainstay runs above or below the BB rather than through the middle of the chain there's an increase in the amount of material required for the frame and a decrease in strength as there will be an offset between the load going through the chainstay and the BB shell carrying it. If this is done by adding a join to the frame then it's more weight again and another point of failure. A TGS 24" bike sounds interesting, mainly because the chainstay length/tyre clearance compromise made with 26" bikes isn't a problem in 24". Rather than a specifically TGS bike I reckon good all round trials geometry would be interesting in its own right rather than going straight to silly high BB's. I for one will be very slow to trust any high EP rear hub that comes out, especially a lightweight one, until it's been bashed heavily by a lot of people with no problems for at least a year or two. The freewheel is one of the areas on a trials bike where absolute reliability is paramount, so the new hub must be a compromise free design. I'd like to see what a sprag clutch based hub would do, but I have my suspicions it might be a bit springy like roller clutch hubs. The other thing to note is that I can barely tell the difference in pickup between a 36 EP XTR hub and a 120 EP Superleggera hub on my XC bike, so once you hit in the region of 40 EP's it's an exercise in diminishing returns adding more.

Just avoid Titec's offerings... The one I used snapped after 6 months with no warning - one side came right off at the stem when I was hopping the bike onto a wall. Azonic double walls are nice too, but I'd still go with the trialtech bar for a trials bike because they feel brilliant...

It might almost make it worth getting the Extreme Sports channel on my Sky subscription...

Only pads I've used on smooth rims were rock greens, which worked fine until any water at all made it onto them at which point they provided no stopping at all. Given it's liable to be raining or wet for the next 6 months I wouldn't go back to smooth rims unless I was planning on giving up trials or moving somewhere a lot drier.

I think the phatpads are thinner, so better for bikes with low clearance between the cranks and Magura slaves. I've used heatsinks and they're the best I've tried, but I'm ditching Maguras for a dual disk bike soon.

Once you tighten the hub bolt on the drive side properly the fixed tensioner on the Echo hubs works beautifully. The Echo fixed tensioner has enough flex to deal with the tension variation as you turn the pedals. Only maintenance it needs is a tiny bit of oil on the jockey wheel bushing every so often. I've been running my one for almost 2 years without a bother... Also if you land on it it will move out of the way too, so they're very hard to damage.

Use 7.5 Wt fork oil if you're happy with the current damping. All the Marzocchis ship with 7.5 Wt. Undo the top caps with a correct sized socket (Let any air pressure in the forks out first). Turn the fork upside down and pump it up and down to empty the old oil. If you're happy with the seals and don't want to dismantle the fork any further then fill the legs of the fork with new oil, pump the fork up and down to get the oil through the fork damping cartridges and then empty it out (This will clean the fork out some bit). If you've got IPA or some other solvent handy you can use this instead of fork oil and probably do a better job of cleaning the fork out. Refill the fork with clean oil pumping the fork up and down to make sure you get all the air bubbles out. Then if it's an air only fork fill the fork legs to the start of the threads for the top caps and fit the top caps. The fork will extend slight as you tighten the top caps. Press in the centre of the valve while pushing down on the fork till it bottoms out. This will leave the maximum amount of oil in the fork. Pump the fork up to the correct air pressure and give it a go. If the fork has too strong a rising rate (You can't get full travel) then take more oil out. A drop of a few mm in the oil height can make a big difference to the fork. If you have coil springs leave about a cm between the bottom of the threads for the top cap and the oil level with the coil spring sticking out of the fork leg. Back all the preload off before opening a coil spring fork (It makes it a lot easier to put the top cap back in).

Only downside to square taper is the BB axles tend to be prone to snapping. If you get a good square taper BB you'll be fine. I went to ISIS after snapping a good few XT square taper BB's and have had no problems with the ISIS axles breaking.

It is actually pretty easy... It takes about as long to do as it does to read the instructions once you know what you're up to.

Head for your local bike shop with one of the bearings and ask for a bag of bearings that size. Hopefully they'll stock them. They should be pretty cheap anyway. 1. Make sure you have the bearing cone, washer and locknut from the threaded part of the pedal axle - hopefully the end cap will have held them in the pedal body. 2. Clean all the grease and dirt from the old parts. 3. Put a layer of grease in the cup shaped rings in each side of the pedal body. 4. Press bearings one by one in a circle around this cup until you can't fit in any more without pushing existing bearings out of the bearing cup. Do this for both bearing cups using the grease to hold the bearings in position. 6. Slide the pedal axle into the pedal body making sure any seals and so on are greased and in the correct locations. 7. Clamp the pedal axle vertically in a vice and screw the bearing cone down onto it. Then fit the washer and then the locknut. Using a flat screwdriver on the flats of the bearing cone tighten it until it seats on the bearings. 9.Spin the pedal to see whether anything is catching or grinding. 10. Back the bearing cone off by about 1/4 turn from where it sits on the bearings and tighten the locknut onto it. 11. Spin the pedal and see if it runs freely. 12. If the pedal won't turn easily loosen the locknut, back the bearing cone off another 1/8 turn and tighten and test again. 13. If the pedal still has play loosen the locknut and tighten the bearing cone 1/8 of a turn. 14. Keep going until the pedal spins properly. With pedal bearings the bearing cups often drift to slightly off round after heavy use, so usually having the bearings set with a small amount of play is better than having them spin mostly freely and without bearing play but with a few tight spots. 15. Replace the axle end cap and refit to your bike. Also don't mix old and new bearings in the same bearing cup - this will cause premature wear as each bearing in a given bag is matched in size very exactly to each other bearing in that bag, but not necessarily to bearings in any other bag the same nominal size.

Unless you crash land hard on the freewheel repeatedly I can't work out how you're breaking them that often. My ENO is running good as new after nearly 2 years use so far...